[Footnote 1:  In 1867 George Peabody, an American merchant and patriot, established the Peabody Educational Fund for the purpose of promoting “intellectual, moral, and industrial education in the most destitute portion of the Southern states.”  The John F. Slater Fund was established in 1882 especially for the encouragement of the industrial education of Negroes.]

Along with the mob violence, moreover, that disgraced the opening years of the century was an increasing number of officers who were disposed to do their duty even under trying circumstances.  Less than two months after his notorious inaugural Governor Vardaman of Mississippi interested the reading public by ordering out a company of militia when a lynching was practically announced to take place, and by boarding a special train to the scene to save the Negro.  In this same state in 1909, when the legislature passed a law levying a tax for the establishment of agricultural schools for white students, and levied this on the property of white people and Negroes alike, though only the white people were to have schools, a Jasper County Negro contested the matter before the Chancery Court, which declared the law unconstitutional, and he was further supported by the Supreme Court of the state.  Such a decision was inspiring, but it was not the rule, and already the problems of another decade were being foreshadowed.  Already also under the stress of conditions in the South many Negroes were seeking a haven in the North.  By 1900 there were as many Negroes in Pennsylvania as in Missouri, whereas twenty years before there had been twice as many in the latter state.  There were in Massachusetts more than in Delaware, whereas twenty years before Delaware had had 50 per cent more than Massachusetts.  Within twenty years Virginia gained 312,000 white people and only 29,000 Negroes, the latter having begun a steady movement to New York.  North Carolina gained 400,000 white people and only 93,000 Negroes.  South Carolina and Mississippi, however, were not yet affected in large measure by the movement.

The race indeed was beginning to be possessed by a new consciousness.  After 1895 Booker T. Washington was a very genuine leader.  From the first, however, there was a distinct group of Negro men who honestly questioned the ultimate wisdom of the so-called Atlanta Compromise, and who felt that in seeming to be willing temporarily to accept proscription and to waive political rights Dr. Washington had given up too much.  Sometimes also there was something in his illustrations of the effects of current methods of education that provoked reply.  Those who were of the opposition, however, were not at first united and constructive, and in their utterances they sometimes offended by harshness of tone.  Dr. Washington himself said of the extremists in this group that they frequently understood theories but not things; that in college they gave little thought to preparing for any definite